hello, I'm currently installing gentoo on this old pc of mine, and things are going bad like all the time.
now I got this problem with fdisk which just won't see /dev/sda. it was no problem before, but I had this clock issue so I had to change battery on the motherboard, and now I'm getting this.

here is the output I get from fdisk:

Code:

livecd ~ # fdisk /dev/sda
fdisk: unable to open /dev/sda: No such file or directory

there is nothing in /dev/ that could possibly explain why /sda or /sdb or anything alike is just not there:

Based on your symptoms, you probably need to enable the hard drive controller in the BIOS setup screen. Whatever settings you had, you lost when you replaced the battery and now are operating on default settings. Strange that it would default to off, but there have been stranger things.

- John_________________I can confirm that I have received between 0 and 499 National Security Letters.

I did double check and tried to load with different bios hdc settings and than even checked the jumpers, and figured out that bios won't see my hard drive. have really no idea of how to fix it - google tells me that in this case hard can be possibly broken, and than it's not a gentoo issue, but the hard drive issue.

Based on your symptoms, you probably need to enable the hard drive controller in the BIOS setup screen. Whatever settings you had, you lost when you replaced the battery and now are operating on default settings. Strange that it would default to off, but there have been stranger things.

Some BIOSes will offer a choice between treating the drive as IDE or as AHCI, primarily so that you can install Windows XP from media that lacks an AHCI driver. Such users would switch to IDE, install Windows XP, download and install an AHCI driver, then switch back to AHCI. He may have a Linux kernel that can only talk to the drive in AHCI mode, which could fail if the BIOS has reset to IDE mode.

BillWho, yeah, I guess it's something alike.
Hu, my bios have not such option.
NeddySeagoon, I checked and even changed to another cable I had in my house and still there's no changes, bios won't see my hard drive. I guess it is broken for real, but I'll check with another hard tomorrow and see what will come out.

Where you using any type of static protection when you changed the battery? If not, you may have damaged either the motherboard (or the hard drive?) If you have another port, you might want to test it. I certainly hope this is not the case._________________First things first, but not necessarily in that order.